Thanks to Cameron Binkley and his librarian contacts at the California Academy of Sciences, I now have confirmation that Laura White’s memorial to her husband, as specified in her will, was indeed realized at CAS. According to academy’s 1958 annual report, the Lovell White Hall of Man and Nature was part of the Hall of Science (along with the Alexander Morrison Planetarium).

RB: So then I gave [the Garden of Allah] to the California Academy of Sciences and they had it for about three years, two or three years and they loved it. The reason I selected that to give it to is because the California Academy of Sciences has a memorial for Ralston’s father, Mr. Lovell White. His mother gave it to the California a memorial there, so I thought it would be very appropriate for the —

CE: The Academy of Sciences. Were they delighted with the bequest?

RB: They certainly were delighted but regrettably their income was restricted to be spent in the City and County of San Francisco so they had to give it up painfully.

A mystery inside a mystery: The Garden of Allah, Ralston and Ruth’s Marin County home, is not the Los Angeles resort of the same name that is the setting for Scott and Hem in the Garden of Allah.

The Hall of Science was demolished as part of CAS’s rebuild in 2008, so maybe Laura and Lovell would have been better off with a plaque or a statue.

This is what we so often find when searching for history—emptiness, quiet, acres of mowed grass. Battlefields where hundreds of men died on a single day become vast, pristine lawns, as lovely as a landscape by Constable or van Gogh, and historic birthplaces are so lovingly maintained that it’s hard to believe anyone ever lived there. Edith Wharton’s cellar becomes a gift shop. In the cemetery quiet of these places, all the clangor and hell of actual history—the smell of manure where horses were bedded, earth scorched from fire pits or cannonball explosions, the stench from bayonets ripping flesh—has been sanitized away. While preserving history, we remove it. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, and I’d rather see a beautifully maintained battlefield than a Wal-Mart parking lot. But that is what we’re doing while visiting historic space. It’s Versailles without the hideously overdressed and clownish aristocrats, a Potemkin village without the rotting slums behind the facades.

In the course of researching the life of Laura Lyon White (Mrs. Lovell White), I came across an interesting turn of events concerning LLW’s estate.

Laura’s husband, Lovell, a banker, died in 1910. Laura died in 1916. Their one surviving son, Ralston, married Ruth Boericke. The terms of Laura’s will specified that, if Ralston and Ruth had no children, a third of the estate was to be held in trust by the Savings Union Bank and Trust Company, later the American Trust Company, to build a monument to Lovell “typical of banking development in the State of California”. This provision seemed reasonable enough in the prosperous years before 1929. However, Ralston and Ruth’s financial circumstances declined during the Great Depression. Thus, when Ralston died in 1943, at his urging, Ruth contested the provision for the memorial.

Ruth lost her case, as far as I can determine, in a appellate court decision handed down in 1945. But if so, American Trust should have erected something. Yet I can find no evidence that a monument was built. I’ve written to a couple of knowledgeable sources, but so far have found no plaques or statues.

… there’s a second way to look at this. The violent opposition to the Vietnam War and the particular violence of May 4 [, 1970] also played a major role in ending the draft and thus insulated students and young people generally from many of the issues that had spurred such activism in the 1960s. Waging war today is a matter of finding the right price point at which sufficient numbers of young men and women will be tempted to risk their lives in service to their country. Arguably, too, it’s a matter of fostering economic conditions—underpaid and underemployed youth, hyper-expensive higher education—that make military service an attractive choice. What’s apparent, though, is that American troops have been in combat somewhere in the world almost continually since November 2001 with barely a whimper from the campuses that led the opposition to the Vietnam War.

—Howard Means, 67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence (2016), p. 220

The states of North and South Carolina are completing the resurvey of their common boundary, using high- and low-tech means, as Stephen R. Kelly notes in a recent op-ed and Kim Severson reported some time back. The colonial-era border was intended to consist of two straight lines, the 35th parallel and a diagonal crossing up from the coast. But 18th- and 19th-century surveyors made a hash of it, resulting in today’s rumpled compromise.

The rework was not intended to smooth out any of the coarse wrinkles, like the wobble around the city of Charlotte, but rather to replace the notched trees, now dead, and wandering survey monuments (including one moved by a golf course in order to impress golfers [?!]) that had originally marked the boundary.

On my way up and down J Street (so you know I wasn’t in downtown D.C.) to visit Mom I passed this charming brick and terra cotta edifice, which turns out to be the Sacramento Turn Verein, now a German language and culture society.

Riding the wave of German immigration in the mid 19th century, the American Turnerbund movement established athletic clubs in Cincinnati; Philadelphia; Columbus, Ohio; and elsewhere. It had its roots in a nationalistic yet democratic student movement in the early 1800’s, founded by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn.

Jahn’s nationalistic spirit contributed to his role as a promoter of “patriotic gymnastics,” recognized as a strong force in Prussia’s liberation. The gymnastic exercises that he introduced were intended to infuse his students with a patriotic love of freedom that would make them capable of bearing arms for their country, in the name of war of liberation.

American Turners opposed slavery and served in the Union Army in the U.S. Civil War.